The owner of the South Bay Galleria won approval this week to move forward with a major redevelopment project just south of the Redondo Beach mall.

The $32 million revitalization plan from Forest City Commercial Group will replace a cluster of aging buildings off Hawthorne Boulevard with a roughly 110,000-square-foot commercial complex.

The long-awaited project promises to bring in three new anchor tenants and six to seven smaller retailers, and it provides a separate 6,500-square-foot pad where developers hope to attract a new sit-down restaurant.

The Redondo Beach Planning Commission unanimously approved a handful of land-use documents for the project about 10 p.m. Thursday, following a lengthy but sparsely attended public hearing in which members weighed landscaping designs, public transit strategies and anticipated traffic effects, among other details analyzed in a thick environmental impact report.

The overall project drew praise from commissioners, who said they were eager to see a makeover for the tired area south of the mall. One Forest City executive described the site as “not cohesive” and “fragmented.”

“I’m real excited. This is great,” Commissioner John Parsons said shortly before the vote, adding that he’s seen several blueprints for the area over the years.

“I think this is a massive improvement for Redondo,” Commissioner Ray Benning added.

The so-called SouthBay South development will cover roughly 11 acres west of Hawthorne and south of 177th Street.

Today, the area is home to a dirt lot where a bowling alley was demolished several years ago, the discount 595-seat Cinema 3 theater, a Bank of America branch and a building once occupied by Thrifty Drug and CompUSA stores. The vast majority of the available commercial space is vacant.

The empty Expo Design Center building, which sits adjacent to bowling alley lot, is not part of the project.

South Bay Associates, a subsidiary of Forest City Commercial Group, will preserve the bank but tear down the surrounding structures. That gives the company the opportunity to redesign the layout and open up the area to passing motorists.

In an interview last month, Kenneth Lee, Forest City’s vice president of West Coast commercial development, said the company’s goal is to attract new shoppers who also are likely to visit the nearby mall.

Developers have described SouthBay South as a “replacement” project – meaning the commercial area penciled into the plan is comparable to the existing and former uses at the site. When considering the defunct 59,183-square-foot bowling alley, the available commercial space totaled 137,607 square feet.

Lee said Forest City is “going to be replacing very similar square footage.”

Still, the project’s environmental impact report noted that four nearby intersections would be “significantly impacted” by more traffic, and that corrective measures would be taken for only one of those, at Inglewood Avenue and Artesia Boulevard.

That was one of the reasons city planners drew up a “statement of overriding considerations,” which essentially says that the project’s benefits – including more sales tax revenue for the city and new jobs for the community – outweigh its unavoidable, negative effects.

With the planning panel’s land-use approvals in hand, the company hopes to break ground in the spring of 2010 and open its new complex in the fall of 2011, Forest City’s Lee said Friday.

The project does not require the City Council’s review.

Lee said it is too soon to name anchors for the new complex, as negotiations are ongoing. But a staff report states that “it is known that one of the prospective tenants is a specialty grocery store” and another one “may be a retailer associated with a business already located in the South Bay Galleria.”

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